How "Deadblood" Was Born

My "new" novelette, Deadblood is out on Amazon as an e-book only, as of today. I originally wrote the story about 20 years ago. I came up with the idea while I was marginally employed as a music journalist in 1993 and 1994, and doing a lot of low-rent travelling around the U.S., interviewing and photographing music artists in the then-burgeoning alternative rock scene. Alternative and Indie are different, though not mutually exclusive descriptors, but that's a rant for another day.

That first version was called "Dying the First Time" and was published as a chapbook in the mid-90's. It was widely rejected by genre magazines in the late 90's. Throughout the 90's there was talk of doing a comic book series based on the idea. I wrote a dozen scripts and some initial pages were drawn, but the project fizzled for reasons I don't really call. I gave up on the story and forgot about it until a film came out in the early 2000's that seemed to incorporate the most critical factor of the story. That's another tale entirely and I'm still a little sore over that experience, so enough said.

In the mid-2000's I actually was starting to have quite a bit of success in contests and getting the attention of editors with more "science fictiony" stories but then I got a good, but demanding, job and started my Master's program, so that was that for a few years.

Now with school a year and a half behind me and my day job evened out, I'm throwing my spare hours into my true avocation. When I was finally able to turn my attention from cost accounting, organizational behavior, marketing, industrial organization, and statistics, I knew I wanted to get some writing done. I started in November 2012 with National Novel Writing Month and a story from a dream that has become The Flatstone Beach. I started on November 28, I think. So obviously I didn't finish by the end of the month, but I kept going and am now about halfway through the first book of what has grown into my The Paler World series.

As I've gone along I've wanted to start meeting potential new friends to share my work with and I got the idea (not terribly original) to re-publish some earlier stuff so readers could get to know me. As I looked through my files, I saw the dusty, worn, and neglected folder labeled "D1T". I was actually nervous about picking it up. I opened it with dread. Twenty years ago I held a GED and had taken two comp courses at my community college. I'd only published non-fiction at the time I originally wrote the story. I had written a lot of non-fiction, but a lot of that wasn't very good. I was afraid to see how bad a fiction writer I was 20 years ago, prior to earning three college degrees, including a writing intensive undergrad degree.

Now I'm not trying to say higher education is over-valued, but I was sucked right back into the story written by my under-educated, younger self. It contained some dated references and some dead giveaways of my immaturity, both generally and as a writer, but it had good bones. So I violated my one rule of writing, i.e. don't start a new project until you've finished this one, and spent about a month rehabbing the old girl. And here she is. I hope you find (or found) it a worthwhile way to spend a few pages.

Deadblood novelette, by L.A. Little

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